Growing up as the son of a pathologist, Thomas Laqueur says, his father would leave the dinner table to conduct autopsies. Sometimes Laqueur would watch his father prepare pathological samples that he had taken from the bodies.

“I lived in a family in which the dead were present,” Laqueur explains to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “My father regarded the dead very routinely, in a way a mortician might regard them. He was interested in them scientifically.”